Is it just me or is the iTunes App Store becoming far too unwieldy to effectively find good applications? Apple does offer lists of the top paid and free apps, but it looks like these are based on download numbers which don’t always equate to high-quality. When I checked just now, the top free app was Vegas Pool Sharks Lite, which had a paltry 2.5 star average rating.Enter Medialets, a company that provides analytics to developers and advertisers, but can also be useful for consumers. The Medialets database tracks the App Store but it offers several search options to help you get more insight as to what you might be downloading or buying. To test the data, I asked for Medialets to return the top free apps and sure enough, the list completely jived with the list I saw in iTunes. That tells me it has accurate data, but how are the search parameters?You can query against the following groups to find what you want: popularity, top free, top paid, average rating, rating count, and price. I was shocked to see that there’s actually a $450 iPhone app, making the software more expensive than the hardware itself! For each search category, you can adjust the query to show results for the last 6 hours, 12 hours, day, two days, week or month. This is key because as new apps appear in the store, they tend to become “popular” as people jump on the download. Viewing longer term data is going to provide a broader picture.Every application result returned in the database results is a hyperlink, so if you want to dig a little deeper you simply click. The information is the same that you’d find in the App Store and there’s a link to the application, which of course opens iTunes. If you’re not into searching databases, no worries. Medialets offers four useful RSS feeds as well: New Apps, Top Free Apps, Top Paid Apps, and Updated Apps.All in all, Medialets offers more search options than iTunes itself, but I’d like to see some additional search parameters added. Without a category parameter for instance, you can’t search for the highest rated Photography or Reference apps. Still, there’s a little more value here than what iTunes is offering in their storefront; that’s ironic since it uses the data from their storefront.Medialets is ready to offer developers and advertisers a similar service for the Google Android Marketplace, so keep an eye out once those T-Mobile G1 devices start to arrive.